At Business Insider, we avidly anticipated the new Ford Ranger, which is actually a built-in-America version of a global pickup that Ford has been selling outside the US. The Blue Oval is already super-strong in full-size trucks — can you say "F-150"? — and back in the day, the Ranger was a popular starter pickup.

In 2019, the entire pickup-truck market is driving US sales, and the midsize offerings are much improved over the little pickups that used to cover this segment. They're really more like shrunken-down full-sizers, and where Chevy (as well as GMC, with the Canyon) and Ford are concerned, the idea is to offer a solid hauler that's simply more compact than a big boy.

We've sampled pretty much everything the market has to offer on this front, so a key question was, "What does Ford bring to the party with the new Ranger?"

The answer is a great truck, with some great features.

When the photographer Greg Benz started having issues with his MacBook Pro, he did what most people would and brought the $7,000 high-end machine in to Apple for repairs, he said in a blog post.

The issue: Benz's MacBook Pro display wouldn't turn on and remained dark no matter what he did. Not even Apple could figure it out. Benz went two weeks without his work machine while Apple twice replaced the computer's logic board (the board that contains the machine's important chips) and swapped out some cables.

Eventually, Apple decided to just replace the MacBook Pro with a fresh unit, similarly valued at $7,000. Fortunately for Benz, his original laptop was under warranty, so he didn't have to pay a dime. But he estimated that if he did have to foot the bill, it would have cost him about $10,000 — which tracks with my own experience trying to replace a Mac's logic board.

Clearly, it would have really stunk if his laptop was not under warranty.

Finally, after all that drama, an Apple Genius shined a flashlight at the screen of his original, problematic unit and found the real answer to the problem. Ready for it? Here it is:

The computer's display brightness was turned all the way down.

A MacBook Pro's logic board. Antonio Villas-Boas/Business Insider

The root of the problem

Indeed, the last time he turned off his computer, the brightness was set to its lowest setting, as he had his MacBook Pro connected to external monitors.

The root cause of Benz's MacBook Pro issue — which involved several expensive repairs that didn't actually fix anything — is absurdly basic. But if you take a step back, it's not entirely Benz's fault and not entirely the Apple technicians', either.

It appears that Benz faced a perfect storm of glitches that led him — and Apple — to think his MacBook Pro was defective or broken.

The screen didn't light up when he turned on his computer, the keyboard didn't light up, his external monitor didn't turn on as it normally does, the screen's brightness wasn't responding to the brightness controls on his external keyboard, and he tried some in-depth troubleshooting that many — if not most — Mac users have never heard of (like resetting the system's PRAM, in case you're wondering).

And perhaps the most important glitch — the Touch Bar, the touchscreen above the keyboard, on Benz's MacBook Pro failed to show up when he turned on his laptop, which prevented him from raising the screen's brightness.

Raising a larger question about the MacBook Pro

Speaking with Business Insider, Benz suggested that the entire repair debacle could have been avoided had his maxed-out $7,000 2018 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar come with old-fashioned physical brightness buttons instead of the touch-sensitive strip that replaces them on its highest-end models.

"Had [the laptop] come with brightness buttons, I absolutely would have tried that," Benz said.

Hollis Johnson/Business Insider

The problem that Benz faced was that the Touch Bar on his MacBook Pro, which would have offered the option to turn up the brightness, wouldn't turn on until after he logged in. And with the screen out of commission, he didn't know that the machine was on the log-in screen.

A fully operational MacBook Pro should have displayed the Touch Bar, where you'd normally find the screen-brightness controls. I turned on a MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar at the office, and the Touch Bar showed up, complete with brightness controls.

It's possible that recent updates to the MacOS operating system changed how the Touch Bar works. In his blog post, Benz said the issue may have had something to do with the specialized software that he uses for his work, such as a screen-calibration tool, he said in his blog post — meaning that most MacBook Pro users are unlikely to run into this exact issue. One of Benz's friends even tried and failed to duplicate one of the issues, he said.

In hindsight, after finally knowing the root cause of the issue, we might all ask why Benz didn't try to log in to his computer by typing his password, even if the screen was black. But everything is so much clearer in hindsight, and Benz's laptop was experiencing glitches that simply refused to let him control his screen's brightness.

Benz's experience serves as good feedback for Apple and a reminder that physical buttons definitely have their place.

Business Insider contacted Apple for comment on Benz's experience but did not hear back.

Amazon's Alexa smart home devices have sparked a new lawsuit that alleges the company recorded audio from millions of children without first getting proper consent from their parents. According to the Seattle Times, a new lawsuit filed in the city's federal court accuses Amazon of violating privacy laws in eight different states that require all parties to consent to a voice recording, regardless of age.

Alexa-powered devices regularly record audio when activated with a wake word, which is "Alexa" by default. Earlier this year Bloomberg found that Amazon employees listen to these recordings and occasionally annotate an "extremely small sample" of them for training purposes. Bloomberg reported that members of the Amazon team that listens to these recordings can listen to as many as 1,000 clips during a nine-hour shift.

The lawsuit claims that Alexa records people regardless of whether they purchased the device or signed up to use the Alexa app, and doesn't warn unregistered users that they're being recorded. The suit goes on to allege that Amazon is violating laws in Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington by not obtaining explicit consent.

Read more: There's a simple way to make sure Amazon workers can't listen to what you say to Alexa — here's how to do it

While consent is required regardless of age in these states, the lawsuit is specifically concerned with protecting minors. The lawsuit claims that Amazon is using the data to glean the habits and personal information of children and "has strong commercial incentives to collect as many Alexa recordings as possible."

If the court finds in favor of the plaintiff, the lawsuit wants Amazon to delete all recordings of underage users and prevent future recordings unless the user grants consent. Additional damages would be considered by the court during the trial.

Alexa owners can manage how Amazon reviews their data via the Alexa app, but you need to opt-out of the "help develop new features" option. Following the Bloomberg report, Amazon introduced a new feature to have Alexa delete all of your voice recordings, but you have to opt in to activate the deletion command and it will only delete your recordings from the current calendar day. The company also launched a new Alexa privacy hub to make it easier to delete your past recordings and manage your smart device settings.

One week after YouTube's controversial decision not to remove videos that contained homophobic slurs, Google CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly sent an email to LGBTQ employees saying the company was taking a "hard look" at its harassment policies and would work more closely with internal LGBTQ groups.

"With respect to YouTube, Susan and the team are already taking a hard look at the harassment policies and will do this in consultation with many groups, including people who have themselves experienced harassment," Pichai said in the emai obtained by the Verge. "We're also thinking through ways to engage more with our LGBTQ+ community at important moments."

It was not clear from the report if Pichai's email was sent to all Google employees, addressed to LGBTQ+ employees, or if the email was sent only to a specific group of individuals at Google.

On Monday, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki apologized at a tech conference in Arizona for the hurt caused by her team's decision not to take down videos from conservative commentator Steven Crowder, though she said that based on the company's current policies, she stood by the decision.

Read more: YouTube CEO apologized to the LGBTQ community for not banning videos involving homophobic slurs last week, but says she stands by the decision

According to the Verge, Pichai and members of his leadership team (not including Wojcicki) met with members of the company's LGBTQ groups on Tuesday to discuss a "pattern" of issues and how it can consult with internal LGBTQ leaders on policy decisions.

Pichai also echoed Wojcicki's apology and said he "especially regret[ed]" the incident taking place during Pride month, according to the email.

Google did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Read the Verge's story for a Pichai's full email.

Walmart is overhauling Jet.com.

The company is moving all Jet employees to Walmart.com, and in the process, Jet president Simon Belsham will be stepping down, Walmart e-commerce CEO Marc Lore wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

"Jet continues to be a very valuable brand to us, and it is playing a specific role in helping Walmart reach urban customers," Lore, who also founded Jet.com, said in the post. "The focus has largely been on NY so far, and we're looking at other cities where we might bring together Jet's expertise and the scale and operating model of Walmart. More to come on that."

Belsham will remain at the company through early August, Lore said. There will be no layoffs and the Jet headquarters in Hoboken, New Jersey, will stay, a Walmart spokesperson told CNBC.

Walmart purchased Jet in 2016 in a $3.3 billion deal. It happened just as Walmart was beefing up its e-commerce initiatives to better do combat with Amazon.

A year later, in 2017, Jet refocused its business on serving urban millennials in cities where Walmart did not have a huge presence, like New York.

Read more: How Walmart turned its $3.3 billion acquisition of Jet.com into its greatest weapon against Amazon

That allowed the brand to exist as a way to reach those customers without cannibalizing sales on Walmart.com, which was — and still is — seeing explosive growth.

At the time, Jet's then-president, Liza Landsman, told Business Insider that Walmart felt it was important to "let Jet be Jet."

Times have changed, as Jet's sales and traffic dropped by 60% in March 2018 when compared to the year prior, according to a report from Bloomberg last year.

In late 2018, Jet relaunched its website, partnering with sought-after brands like Nike, and it unveiled a same-day grocery delivery program in the New York City area, powered by a warehouse in the Bronx.

"Really the whole new site and business relaunch is just the beginning really of our direction for Jet and broader than that how we're thinking about the future of where we want to take retail and e-commerce," Belsham told Business Insider at the time.

"E-commerce today isn't going to be e-commerce in the future, and this is the start of how Jet can fit into that."

More than 50 new emoji will become standard in 2019, based on the final list approved by the Unicode Consortium. Unicode is responsible for defining which emojis make onto all platforms, including iPhones, Android devices, and computers.

Many of the new icons are tied together by the theme of inclusivity, introducing emoji for deaf people, blind people, people in wheelchairs, and those with prosthetic limbs. This year's update will allow users to choose the race and gender of both people when choosing an emoji that features a couple. Unicode first introduced support for skin color in 2015, but users were limited to heterosexual emojis for couples, and could only select couples with the same skin tone.

While there are 59 distinct new emoji, variations for skin tone and gender make for a total of 230 individual images. A March update to Unicode made the emoji usable online, but each company will choose when to introduce its own version of the new emoji. (Apple typically adds new emojis to its iOS devices with a Fall update.)

Here are the new emoji coming online later this year, with images from Emojipedia:

Given the ongoing privacy scandals that have surrounded Facebook over the past year, there are plenty of reasons why the general public may be skeptical of the social network.

But a persistent myth that's floated around for years is the idea that Facebook eavesdrops on personal conversations and then later serves ads based on what you say. That simply isn't true, says Facebook.

The belief came about as people began to come forward with stories over the years in which they had encountered Facebook ads that closely mirrored recent conversations. For example, one couple saw wedding ads the day after they had gotten engaged, before they had even told anyone, as the BBC reported.

Facebook issued a statement in 2016 to debunk this claim. "Facebook does not use your phone's microphone to inform ads or to change what you see in the News Feed," the company wrote. "We show ads based on people's interest and other profile information — not what you're talking out loud about."

Aside from the paper calendar that hangs in the kitchen that my wife keeps updated, my Google calendars are the only place I record upcoming meetings, events, birthdays, and anything else I need to remember.

I love using Google Calendar because, unlike a note jotted down on paper, I can't lose it. And I can access it from my computer, tablet, or phone from anywhere on earth I have web access.

Adding a new Google Calendar is a quick and easy process, and it's worth mastering. Keeping separate calendars for different areas of your life helps you compartmentalize your work and home schedules.

Just make sure you cross-reference each of your calendars when making plans, as it's easy to forget what you have on each individual calendar.

How to add a new Google Calendar and customize it

1. Log into your Google account, then click the Google Apps logo, which is the square formed by nine dots at the top right corner of the screen.

2. Click on the Calendar icon, which is a blue box with the number 31 on it.

Open Google Calendar. Steven John/Business Insider

3. Locate the words "Other calendars" on the taskbar at the left and click the plus symbol (+) beside it.

Click the plus sign to open a menu where you can create a new calendar. Steven John/Business Insider

4. Click the words "Create new calendar."

5. On the page that appears, enter a calendar name, an optional description, and select your preferred time zone, then hit the blue box that reads "Create calendar."

Enter in your calendar's information, including its name. Steven John/Business Insider

And there you have it, your brand new Google Calendar.

Infarm wants to put a farm in every grocery store

Remember Taxify?

This was the Estonian ride-hailing startup that built up market share by focusing markets where Uber didn't have much of a presence, namely eastern Europe and Africa.

It then expanded to London in a blaze of glory in 2017, vowing to break Uber's monopoly. The startup immediately fell afoul of the UK capital's strict licensing laws and had to pull its service just four days after launching.

Almost two years after this unceremonious exit, Taxify has cleaned up its act, won back its London operator's licence, and relaunched in London as Bolt.

The deal for Londoners will be similar to Uber: open up the Bolt app, add your card details, and then summon a cab to take you from A to B. The company is promising that it's rides will be up to 15% cheaper than the competition (read: Uber), and that it will initially charge 7.5% commission on fares. Bolt also offers scooter rides elsewhere in Europe, but since electric scooters remain illegal in the UK that won't be on offer in London.

The Bolt app works similarly to Uber. Shona Ghosh/Business Insider

A spokesman for London's transport regulator Transport for London confirmed to Business Insider that Bolt had been granted a 15-month licence. The spokesman said: "Bolt has been granted a London private hire operator's licence after meeting all the necessary requirements."

Bolt's 25-year-old CEO and founder Markus Villig said the company had learnt "many" lessons from falling foul of the regulator two years ago.

"The part that we were hoping for and were frustrated by — Uber has this huge monopoly in London, it being one of the most profitable and biggest markets in the world," he told Business Insider.

"On the one hand that was really harming consumers and drivers but on the other hand it means it's also massive opportunity for us to enter. It's been a nervous time for the last one or two years... it's been a bit more stressful than other launches. But we learned, we've grown quite a bit as a company."

Villig said it had become considerably harder to win an operator's licence in London, and that Bolt had to demonstrate it could run a 24/7 emergency call service for passengers and that it had properly vetted its thousands of drivers in order to appease Transport for London.

Bolt's London relaunch comes amid a wider reckoning for the neo-transportation sector.

Uber and Lyft remain vastly unprofitable and held tepid IPOs earlier in 2019. Scooter startups also remain unprofitable. Why is Bolt going to be different?

For one thing, Villig says, the company has occasionally been profitable despite being absent from the US market and, for the last two years, London. That's because the company has pursued a fundamentally different strategy, he said.

"The worry about these companies is whether they can be profitable," Villig said, referring to Uber and Lyft. "We're one of the few, maybe the only one, that has demonstrated a few profitable quarters in the last years.

"Coming from Estonia, it was always about being as frugal as possible and focusing more on low costs and automation. When we look at how much money we're burning relative to gross bookings or amount of rides, we're burning substantially less than Lyft or Uber."

Bolt is still a private company and its finances are not publicly available for us to verify this.

The firm says it has 25 million customers across 30 countries. For context, local peer MyTaxi says it has 10 million riders, while Uber says it has 91 million monthly active users across all its services.

Villig said that unlike its rivals, Bolt hasn't tried to grow rapidly and maintain a monopoly in every market. Rather it has focused on the markets where rivals had little to no presence and then grow sustainably from there. Having China's dominant ride-hailing firm, Didi Chuxing, as investor and advisor doubtless helped.

Villig added: "The IPOs benefited us because investors are looking at the bottom line, and not just 'How fast can we grow?' but also 'Is it a sustainable model?'"

Amazon has another Go store in New York, and it's built for caffeine-craving New Yorkers.

The new store, which is Amazon's 13th Go store nationwide and the second one in New York, opened on Tuesday.

Located at 300 Park Ave. in midtown Manhattan, the store is designed to cater to the Monday-to-Friday work crowd.

Its 1,700 square feet is stocked with snacks, lunch options like sandwiches and salads, and some of what Amazon calls "local favorites," including Magnolia Cupcake and Ess-A-Bagel.

The new location will also have a self-serve Starbucks coffee bar, offering up three different roasts of Starbucks coffee — blonde, medium, and dark — as well as 12 different Starbucks espresso drinks.

"We partnered up with Starbucks to make sure we're offering really great coffee," Cameron Janes, Amazon's vice president of physical stores, told Business Insider.

He also said the store will be freshly brewing the coffee every 45 minutes.

"It's all up to Starbucks standards," Janes said. "And we think it's going to be a great offering."

Amazon Go patrons can choose between an Americano, cappuccino, latte, double espresso, cafè mocha, cinnamon dolce latte, vanilla latte, caramel latte, hazelnut latte, sugar-free vanilla latte, hot chocolate, and Vanilla Steamer. All the options come with 2% milk.

The 300 Park Ave. location is the first location outside Seattle to offer fresh coffee drinks. The service was recently introduced at Amazon Go's 300 Boren Ave. N. location.

All Go stores feature Amazon's cashierless "just-walk-out" technology that uses sensors and cameras to track what customers take off shelves and out of the store, charging shoppers appropriately.

Amazon's first Go store in New York opened on May 7 in the Battery Park City neighborhood of Manhattan in the Brookfield Place shopping center.

Read more: Amazon exec reveals one of the biggest things the company has learned about shoppers at its cashierless Go stores

"The reception in Brookfield Place has been super positive," Janes said. "So that's one of the reasons we're really excited to be opening up in midtown."

The Brookfield Place location was the first Amazon Go store to also accept cash with its app-based just-walk-out technology.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki apologized to the LGBTQ community for not banning videos involving homophobic slurs last week, but maintained that she believed the company made the right decision based on its current policies.

"I know that the decision we made was very hurtful to the LGBTQ community and that was not our intention at all," Wojcicki said on Monday at Recode's Code Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. "I thought it was really important to be upfront about that and to say that, that was not our intention. And we're really sorry about that."

The apology followed a tumultuous week for YouTube following its decision not to remove videos from one of its stars Steven Crowder after the conservative commentator made repeated homophobic remarks about Vox journalist, Carlos Maza.

Initially, YouTube said Crowder's language did not constitute a violation of its policies, and that the videos would remain up. However, a day later, YouTube said that it was "suspending" Crowder's ability to make money from his channel.

On Monday, Wojcicki said that based on the context of the videos, she believed YouTube had made the right decision regarding Crowder.

"I agree that that was the right decision," she said. "When we look at harassment and we think about harassment, there are a number of things we look at. First of all, we look at the context. Was this video dedicated to harassment or was it a one-hour political video that had, say, a racial slur in it? Those are very different kinds of videos."

YouTube's chief exec also said the team takes into consideration whether videos are "malicious with the intent to harass."

"For right or for wrong right now, malicious is a high bar for us," Wojcicki said.

Internally, Google employees are reportedly angered by the Crowder episode, but some say they're afraid to speak up for fear of retaliation from the company and their conservative colleagues. Also, because of its controversial decision, Google could be banned from participating in San Francisco's annual Pride celebration later this month.

As for how Wojcicki can be sorry about implications to the LGBTQ community, while at the same time, standing by her company's decision, the chief exec says it comes down to needing to be consistent.

"We need to enforce those policies consistently. If we were not to enforce it consistently what would happen is there would be literally millions of other people saying, 'What about this video? What about this video? What about this video? And why aren't all those videos coming down?'" Wojcicki said. "We don't want to be knee jerk… We need to have consistent policies. They need to be enforced in a consistent way."

Do you work at Google? Got a tip? Contact this reporter via Signal or WhatsApp at +1 (209) 730-3387 using a non-work phone, email atThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Telegram at nickbastone, or Twitter DM at@nickbastone.